Zutons, Coral, Summertyme against fracking

There's plans afoot to smash the bedrock of Wirral to pieces in order to release some fossil fuels, because if we don't burn that gas we might not be able to hit the oil industry's target of making the planet uninhabitable by 2020.

There's protests against the plan, including a gig with some Merseyside luminaries:

The Fight UCG and Fracking gig is being organised by Wirral band The Sundowners with Zutons guitarist Paul Molloy. It will feature sets from Viper Kings with guests Dave McCabe (Zutons) and James Skelly (Coral), Ian Skelly and the Serpent Power, We Are Catchers, Sundowners (acoustic) Edgar Summertyme and Marvin Powell.

There's a petition on 38 Degrees if you'd like to add your voice without having to listen to The Zutons.

Gibson pay tiny fine; get away with despoiling Madagascar

So, the depth of Gibson guitar's venality in importing wood from protected rainforest in India and Madagascar is unquestionable, but Gibson are still maintain they weren't to know. Professor W John Thomas of Quinnipiac University is quoted by the New York Times:

By the terms of the agreement, Gibson concedes that after traveling to Madagascar in 2008, it received a report concluding that “It is currently illegal to harvest or export ebony.” In 2009, on the advice of a Gibson employee who counseled that a German wood supplier named T.N. (Theodore Nagel) could supply the company with ebony obtained from “the grey market,” Gibson arranged for four shipments of Madagascar ebony. Furthermore, “Gibson assumed, without asking, that T.N. had undertaken to provide it with lawfully harvested and exported materials.”

Ah, yes, that old grey ebony. We all know that. Gibson, we're supposed to believe, were like the customers of Burke and Hare, delivered of a large pile of human body parts and never thinking to ask where they came from.

Gibson's now done a deal with the US government, where it pays a tiny fine:

Gibson will pay a $300,000 fine, make a $50,000 contribution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and forfeit wood valued at $261,000 seized in the 2009 government raid on its Nashville facilities.

Yes, the fine barely even matches the value of the wood the company had had ripped from underneath endangered species on its behalf. Pitiful.

Worse, because the US government can't quite decide on the status of the other protected wood Gibson - sorry, this totally different German company what Gibson had no reason to believe was anything other than pure than the driven, guv, honest - had procured, Gibson gets it back. That wood is worth USD155,000. As wood. By the end of turning that little lot into overpriced guitars, Gibson might even be showing a tiny profit. Well done them, eh?

Gibson in the jungle

A couple of years back, Gibson was caught using Rosewood illegally sourced in Madagascar.

The wood was discovered in a 2009 raid by the Environmental Investigation Agency in the US. Because Gibson had previously worked with environmental groups - and because Gibson's chair and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz was on the board of the Rainforest Alliance at the time - the company got cut a surprising amount of slack over the illegal wood:

“I think that the first statement on all of this is that Gibson has shown an awful lot of leadership historically on environmental issues,” said Scott Paul, director of forest campaigns for Greenpeace USA.

Gibson denied knowing that the wood was dodgy:

[O]n the company’s Internet message boards, general counsel Bruce Mitchell said in July that any wood Gibson purchased from Madagascar was legal and that suppliers “provided assurances” as such.

“Gibson affirmatively believes that any wood we have obtained from Madagascar is in fact from legal sourcing,” Mitchell said.

This would seem hugely unlikely, but - hey - Gibson were working with environmental groups, right?

Juszkiewicz took a "leave of absence" from the Rainforest Alliance board, but generally it appeared everything was going to blow over. Be forgotten.

Trouble is, Gibson decided they wanted the seized wood back. A case for forfeiture has been filed by the Department Of Justice which Gibson are resisting.

As part of the DOJ response to Gibson, it appears that some internal Gibson emails have made it into the public domain which, if genuine, prove that not only did Gibson import illegal wood, but it knew the wood was illegal when it imported it:

"[A] Gibson employee…wrote that '[t]he true Ebony species preferred by Gibson Musical Instruments is found only in Madagascar (Diospryos perrieri). This is a slow-growing tree species with very little conservation protection and supplies are considered to be highly threatened in its native environment due to over exploitation.' In fact, [he] 'spent two and a half weeks in Madagascar this June [2008],’ writing on his return, 'I represented our company along with two other guitar manufacturers.... All legal timber and wood exports are prohibited because of wide spread corruption and theft of valuable woods like rosewood and ebony.'

Guitars are brilliant things. But they're not worth despoiling a unique environment for; they're not more brilliant than the lemurs whose habitat is being slowly munched away by illegal logging. If the allegations against Gibson are proven, the company deserves to have the book thrown at it, very hard indeed.

If it was pretending to be ecologically aware while turning a blind eye to where some of its wood was coming from, it deserves to be ostracised.

When your midlife crisis hits, maybe you should consider a Les Paul?

Bono's fronds: Did Vox save a forest?

The Moscow Times appears convinced that Bono has saved the threatened Khimki Forest:

President Dmitry Medvedev ordered a halt to the construction of a highway through the Khimki forest Thursday, marking a rare victory for a grassroots effort that the authorities heavy-handedly tried to squash but nevertheless swelled into a thousands-strong rally last weekend and the intervention of U2 frontman Bono.

Really, though?

Natalia Antonova isn't convinced:

There was an “intervention” on behalf of Bono in regards to the destruction of the Khimki forest? Where is the evidence of this intervention?

Unless he comes out and says otherwise, he didn’t bring it up with Medvedev. According to at least Chirikova (a prominent defender of the Khimki forest), he actually didn’t make any promises regarding the issue.

Bono and his stupid glasses can waltz in to this country and then waltz back out again with no risk to himself or his career, express “regret” for failing to raise any actual issues with the president, and then try to make himself look cool by aligning with someone like Yury Shevchuk. I’m wildly impressed.

It does look like all the heavy lifting has been done by Shevchuk and his campaign, while Bono has, once again, just turned up for the applause at the end.

Indeed, so late did Bono turn up, as Foreign Policy reports, he didn't even know about the planned driving of the highway through the trees when he was talking to President Medvedev:

Bono had gotten an open letter from Shevchuk before the concert about Khimki, and he spent the hours before his Moscow show giving pre-concert interviews to Russian papers in which he said he wished he'd known about the Khimki forest so he could've brought it up with Medvedev.

Given that protesters have been fighting the Kremlin for years on this - and the Kremlin has been violently fighting back - it must be galling for them to be hearing that their efforts didn't do anything and the forest has been saved, instead, by a tax-avoiding former pop star doing a Bob Dylan cover, who had only known about the road proposal for a few hours.

Not that the forest has been saved - the plans are being re-examined, which - as we learn from the story of Ringo's house - might merely be a way of getting the campaign to break up and disperse.

And, the real kicker: Foreign Policy suggests the stay of tree-felling is down to more pragmatic concerns than What Bono Says. The burning of Russia this summer played its own part:

Even Chadaev admits that. "The summer heat wave and the forest fires had a much bigger influence on our decision to save the forest than the noise around the Khimki forest," he told me, alluding to the catastrophic environmental disaster that many have blamed on human interference in nature.

Still, nothing is going to save this from being seen as another victory for Bono. Be warned: if you're currently campaigning to stop Tesco opening a store on your high street, watch out for Bono turning up as soon as he hears that the boys in Delamere Road are cooling on the plan.

Sting vs Paxman: "You're not being blamed for the global crisis, you're just being called a hypocrite"

As Newsnight swung into its Copenhagen stride last night, Sting appeared for a meeting with Jeremy Paxman:



The highlight would be Sting shifting uncomfortably in his seat when Paxman asked him if he felt uncomfortable wooshing between all his houses, and then appearing to suggest that he could have such a carbon-heavy lifestyle because he's earned it helping the rainforests. That throws an interesting perspective on his behaviour.

Sting also ducks the obvious question after he's called for the West to pay nations with rain forests. "How much should they pay?" asks Paxman. Sting suggests that would be a question for expert. The implication being that his work is based on a lack of expertise, then.

In conclusion, Sting claims that he's not looking for individuals to make changes, but targeting large corporations. Fine, but the introduction points out that Sting was last year's highest-paid musician after a massive, global tour. Isn't The Police a large corporation, Sting?

[Thanks to Mike E]

Against Trump

Donald Trump's bemusing desire to ruin the Scottish countryside by building a golf course on the coast is generating a pleasing amount of local opposition: There's a gig in support of the campaign this Friday, 25th, at the Aberdeen Blue Lamp. No word on who will be playing, but local artists of all types are involved.

Pixie Lott of CO2

How better to promote the new album by Pixie Lott than by chartering a plane, filling it with people like Zoe Griffin and flying the bloody thing to Berlin for no apparent reason?

Yeah, admittedly, you can travel to Berlin by regular flight, or even ground transport. Or hold the album launch in somewhere in the UK. Perhaps in London, where most of the people seem to have started their journey. But - while that might not be such a terrible thing to do to the planet - there would have been less opportunity for a photo op of Lott wearing a pilot's cap.

"If you think the launch pumped a lot of polluted old rubbish into the atmosphere," said a made-up source familiar with the story, "wait until you hear what the filler tracks are like."

Ziggy Stardust and the spider from... Malaysia

I suppose if you want to draw attention to a rare, endangered spider naming it after David Bowie isn't the worst thing you could do:

The Heteropoda davidbowie is distinguished by its large size and yellow hair, and is only found in parts of Malaysia.

Bowie was apparently selected for the honour because of his musical contribution to arachnid world – the 1972 concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Trouble is, if you're talking about Bowie and rarely-seen spiders hanging by a thread, aren't you more likely to conjure memories of the ill-fated Glass Spider tour?

Peter Jäger, the German spider expert who discovered the Heteropoda davidbowie, said that naming spiders after celebrities helped draw attention to the marginal status of many species as human activity destroys their habitats.

There's something a little crushing about that, isn't there? That the survival of entire species depends on getting just a little of the glamour and attention generated by Jordan arriving at a shoeshop?

Microsoft "reveal" digital more green than physical

Yes, thanks for stating the bleedin' obvious, Microsoft and Intel, who have produced some figures to point out that downloading electronic files has less environmental impact that having to wait for someone to make a product, drive it to a store, and then take it home from there.

Tomorrow: Microsoft produce a graphic showing that it's easier to correct errors using a word processor rather than a typewriter.

The Edge defends environmental despoilation of U2 tour... sort of

Last week, we had the unedifying spectacle of U2 trying to explain why their hypocritical tax position wasn't hypocritical - it seemed to boil down to "you wouldn't understand".

This week, The Edge is trying to tell us why hauling a massive stage around the planet, and dragging trucks up and down narrow lanes, isn't actually bad for the planet:

"I think anybody that's touring is going to have a carbon footprint."

Well, yes. Anyone who does anything is going to have a carbon footprint, The Edge.

The problem is that yours is totally out of proportion.

"I think it's probably unfair to single out rock 'n' roll."

Given that - in case you've forgotten - your boss is always banging on about fighting injustice, it's probably very, very fair indeed to single out your band and compare what you do with what you preach. And nobody is singling out rock and roll, you twit. You're not being asked to account for formula one's footprint because you're not racing motor cars.

And, lest we forget: your environmental impact is enormous, and doesn't need to be because you don't need to have a bloody massive claw-thing, do you?

"There's many other things that are in the same category but as it happens we have a programme to offset whatever carbon footprint we have."

The rich man's response - I'll shit in your kitchen and then pay for you to buy some paper towels to clean it up - isn't really cutting it, Mr Edge. There's such a thing as setting an example and not doing the damage in the first place. And offsetting doesn't work all that well; nor does planting trees really help overmuch.

And it's not just carbon - you're generating other waste at the same time. And then there's the massive lorries chuntering through those small Irish roads. Do you have an answer for that, The Edge?

"I think that's probably about as realistic as you can be right now," The Edge told BBC 6 Music.

"We'd love to have some alternative to big trucks bringing the stuff around but there just isn't one."

Playing somewhere where the delivery of the staging doesn't create so much disruption? Concentrating on building a show which requires a lot less staging to be brought in? Spending a bit more money on doing it in a more sympathetic way? Putting some thought into the way your tour works, rather than just sticking out a basic "ooh, what can you do, though" response when someone points out how mucky you are? Just a few ideas, The Edge.

George Sampson's mum "tidies up"

Lesley Sampson - mother of George Sampson, of course - has been charged with flytipping after, it is alleged, she dumped sixteen bags of his fanmail outside his house.

Lesley has denied the charge; the case has been adjourned.

U2 push planet closer to the edge

Bono, we all know, loves for us all to know how much he loves the planet.

Except when he goes on tour, with the carbon footprint of the current tour massive enough to have got the band to Mars and back.

If it was just flying them to Mars, that might have been a effort worth expending. But, no, it could bring them back again.

Bob Geldof invites advertisers of unneccessary shit to salve consciences with tiny logo

Bob Geldof and - tonight playing the role of someone who you'd hope would know better - Kofi Annan have flown to Cannes in a bid to try and stop stop climate change by, erm, putting a small logo on their adverts:

In fact, Annan and Geldof want this to be more than a campaign. They want a climate justice movement to be born amid the acres of polished marble and €15 vodka and tonics of the French Riviera and launched an appeal to ad agencies and their clients to place Tck Tck Tck logos on their advertisements. Consumers can then upload their own individual "Tcks" to the campaign website, representing the seconds counting down to Copenhagen and the immediacy of the issue at hand.

I suppose if this was tuts rather than tcks, it might be appropriate - a vague, disapproving but detached noise.

Any similarity between this and Bob's colleague-cum-competitor-for-sainthood Bono's Red campaign, which also somehow tried to make the purchasing of luxury goods seem like a positive act, is entire.

Kofi tries to explain why this is actually going to make a difference and isn't just some tatty greenwash:

"I can't imagine a company that would put a Tck Tck Tck on its ad campaign or website, and continue to operate without [being greener]. Its own staff, its own workers will be reminded what are we doing here."

That's funny. You'd have thought that a half-decade of running an organisation where the least contentious ideas turn into the focus of pointless posturing and sabre-truth tiger-rattling rows would have made Kofi a bit more cynical, or perhaps realistic. But given how oil companies are quite happy to pump cash both into persuading Congress to let them drill in areas of beauty and running ads stressing how green they are, I don't think I can share Annan's hopes.

Noel Gallagher is just so cool about not being cool

You'd have thought that if you wanted to shut Chris Martin up about the environment, you'd ask him about his SUV or private plane. Not if youre Noel Gallagher, though:

"He said: 'Why do you think it's cool not to care?' and I said, 'Well, I don't think it's cool, I don't think I'm being cool.'

"I actually couldn't give a fuck about what's going on outside my family: me, my missus, my two kids and my mam, and her parents... that's it, for me.

"Other than that, it's not my problem, but that's not to say you shouldn't care about it!

"Each to their own and I'm glad there's people like that. But I just like to look after my own."

Happily, Noel doesn't live in the same planet as anybody else, and his family will somehow not be affected by the changing climate. For some reason. Perhaps his guitar will somehow deflect... something...
... live in the forest... forage for food... he's not just showing off like a teenage kid affecting not to be bovvered, no...

Chris Martin loves the environment

Chris Martin might have made himself look a little two-faced driving an SUV in a city centre while campaigning for the environment. The private jet would suggest a third, maybe fourth face.

MTV despoils

MTV has always been keen to present itself as a green, caring network - suggesting everyone gets sorting trash into three types of recycling, making little cartoons promoting the idea of not slaughtering polar bears, that sort of thing.

It turns out, though, that when it is in a position to actually do something itself, it's less careful. TMZ are running photos that it claims are of the mess left behind in the Panamanian rainforests after the network filmed a Real World/Road Rules challenge. Classy.

Moby heads off for space

For years, Moby has bristled when interviewers ask him about how his ecological beliefs square with his music popping up in car commercials. He'll be delighted to know that won't happen any more.

Because there's a much more jaw-dropping "don't do as I do, do as I say" element popping up in his future:

Moby signed up with Virgin Galactic to rocket into outer space on the first space tourism flight in 2010 for $207,000 U.S.

Ah, yes, burning through an enormous pile of fuel, pumping extra emissions into the atmosphere and bursting through the ozone layer for no reason other than to be able to say "I went in a plane high up in the sky". That's the way to show your support for Connect2earth.org, Moby.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Greenguysglobal visits Glastonbury to look at proceedings with an ecological eye:

Last year there were signs everywhere to tell people not to p*ss in the streams, this year there were less. It may be a coincidence but there were a lot more people relieving themselves that way this year, and even more people not taking them to task about it. I guess the number of dead fish, and reduced water oxygen will eventually give the real picture.

Gordon in the morning: Gushing without Yellow

We're never quite sure if it's that, when he gets access to a household name, Gordon feels obliged to gush, or if he's contractually obliged to gush, but naturally a few minutes hanging out with Coldplay has resulted in a large chunk of student paper wowism this morning.

It's a pity, actually, as Martin did give the paper some nice quotes:

“I think our concert will be really cool and a good balance between old and new. Because that’s the danger at this point – to not play Yellow.

“When people say we have moved on and shouldn’t play old hits like Yellow, I laugh.

“It’s like growing your hair and then wearing a hat. What’s the point of growing it? That’s how I feel about hits.”

Trouble is, Gordon doesn't quite know how to cope with this and tries to keep up with the knowingly-weird:

When Chris grows his hair long, I sometimes do wish he would wear a hat. Does that mean I don’t like Yellow?

He doesn't manage it.

Told that the new show is based on Mary Poppins, the Bizarre column seizes its chance to write a headline on the model of the Scottish football classic Super Caley Go Ballistic - Celtic Are Atrocious:

Super-Coldplay base-their-show-on-Poppins, how precocious

They don't manage it. It doesn't even have the right number of syllables in it.

Meanwhile, Gordon sneers at Radiohead's attempts to give away French gig tickets to cyclists:

RADIOHEAD were left with a raft of empty seats at a recent French gig after a ticket giveaway proved a dismal failure.

Dismal? Well, they only had a 30% take up. A raft of seats? 70 unused tickets in a 17,000 venue. Still, why let the facts get in the way of laughing at people who try to do something about the environment, then?

Celine Dion: How wet is she?

Never mind John McCain's health records (old man sometimes sick; rich man gets good medical care - excuse me for not holding the front page), the really fascinating document we probably didn't need but now in the public domain is Celine Dion's water usage. She apparently gets through about sixty-five times the average amount of water used by people in her neck of the woods; her people chose not to comment which, I think, leaves us free to speculate just how many flushes she needs to chase the sausage away each morning.